Category: Random

I recently read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. It’s not as weirdly fascinating as his earlier book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but it has a lot of interesting information. What I found most interesting was the shift in the recommendations of the McGovern commision on nutrition in 1977. This was the first attempt to…

Visiting Maine at this time of year reminds me how winter is the limiting factor for life in the north. Every plant and animal which lives there has a complex and energy intensive survival mechanism for the cold: insulation, hibernation, migration, etc. Where I live now in California the limiting factor is the long, dry,…

Are economic sanctions a good idea? Sanctions were applied to Iraq between the two Gulf wars. They had no obvious effect on the leadership. They inflicted significant harm on ordinary citizens of Iraq. We are currently applying sanctions to North Korea. Again, it is not obvious that the leadership is affected, and, again, the ordinary…

There is some interesting research by Duncan Watts which seems to show that popular songs are popular because they are popular. He ran some experiments which showed that when people rank songs, the dominant effect is other people’s rankings. Thus even a small recommendation for a song by a couple of people can translate into…

I used to think that unions were bureaucratic organizations which mainly existed to get in people’s way. The closed shop seemed particularly dubious in that all employees were required to pay union dues, effectively imposing a tax on working. My thinking has changed to some degree. While unions are deeply imperfect, they do have a…